Monday, July 16, 2007

This Friday when Brittany Snow will be joining a line of 18 other young actors who've pretended to be birthed from the glorious DNA of Michelle Pfeiffer. Brittanny plays Amber Von Tussell, Tracey Turnblad's chief rival for dancing glory and Link's heart in 60s Baltimore. Here's the thing: If you remove the matching hair and outfits, the frothy pink lipstick, and sourpuss demeanors, Michelle and Brittany don't really look like mother and daughter.

This is exceedingly minor quibbling, yes. It's nowhere close to the egregious "huh?" that greets a lot of parent/child casting (the most recent horrid example was in The Upside of Anger wherein not one of Joan Allens' daughters looked anything like her or anything like each other) and it's better than the mother/daughter casting of White Oleander, which was La Pfeiffer's last foray into the realm of matched set performances. Truly Alison Lohman didn't match her looks at all: Alison's eyes are close together, Pfeiffer's are wide set, the faces and lips are very different shapes. It was sort of the point of the film that Lohman wasn't alien gorgeous like LaPfeiff, but still...

Here's my ideal casting for a mother/daughter combo in a future film --yes, I'm a giver. Free Advice! to Hollywood's casting directors even though I covet their jobs-- this is Pfeiffer and Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls, Big Love) pictured @ roughly the same age.

Wide set blue eyes, flattish blonde hair, full cheeks and lips. Plus: both talented. It's not an exact match but it's closer than the movies have gotten with the exception of Jonathan Jackson (geez, what happened to his career?) who was exceedingly believeable as her son in The Deep End of the Ocean: same angularity of beauty and good chemistry in performance, too, both of them tight skinned with unarticulated rage and sadness.

The other actors who've played Michelle's children are Saoirse Ronan (from the eternally unreleased I Could Never Be Your Woman and soon to challenge Dakota Fanning's throne with a bunch of film projects), Claire Danes (To Gillian on her 37th Birthday), Chase Mackenzie Bebak (I am Sam), Katharine Towne (What Lies Beneath), Jake Sandvig and Casey and Dylan Boersma (The Story of Us), Cory Buck and Ryan Merriman and Michael McElroy (Deep End of the Ocean), Alex D Lindz (One Fine Day), and five towhead blond tykes (The Wiches of Eastwick --her character "Sukie Ridgemont" was very fertile, part of the plot) who were mostly never seen again.

But anyway. This is all just me blabbering about casting because I like to champion Amanda Seyfried (who'll soon be playing Meryl Streep's daughter in Mamma Mia! ) but here they are again... like (fictional) daughter like (fictional) mother.

14 comments:

People have two parents. I think it's okay to cast someone with different features, as long as they don't look like they were delivered by the Fairies in the night. I liked Alison Luhrman as Pfeiffer's daughter.

MERYL STREEP and RYAN GOSLING. I did a post about this once. Their features are scarily similar, and they're both great actors. They'd be amazing as mother and son in a sort of light family comedy type thing. I'm actually considering writing a film with part that would fit JUST so I can entertain the pipe dream of casting them.

I think you've officially gone insane, and I like it! While we're on the subject, why has no one ever thought to cast Elias Koteas as Robert De Niro's son? I guess it would age Bobby D too much, but they're dead ringers.